October 15, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
- Electronic voting machines owned by Mitt Romney's
business buddies and set to count the votes in Cincinnati
could decide the 2012 election.

The
narrative is already being hyped by the corporate media. As
Kelly O'Donnell reported for NBC's Today Show on Monday,
October 8, Ohio's Hamilton County is "ground zero" for
deciding who holds the White House come January, 2013.

O'Donnell pointed out that no candidate has won the White
House without carrying Ohio since John Kennedy did it in
1960. No Republican has EVER won the White House without
Ohio's electoral votes.

As we
document in the e-book WILL THE GOP STEAL AMERICA'S 2012
ELECTION (
www.freepress.org ) George W. Bush got a second term in
2004 thanks to the manipulation of the electronic vote count
by Ohio's then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.
Blackwell served as the co-chair of the state's committee to
re-elect Bush/Cheney while simultaneously administering the
election.

The
widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and
of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell
to electronically flip a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory
in the dead of election night. ES&S, Diebold and Triad were
all owned or operated by Republican partisans. The shift of
more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 am election night was a
virtual statistical impossibility. It was engineered by
Michael Connell, an IT specialist long affiliated with the
Bush Family. Blackwell gave Connell's Ohio-based GovTech
the contract to count Ohio's votes, which was done on
servers housed in the Old Pioneer Bank Building in
Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thus the Ohio vote tally was done
on servers that also carried the e-mail for Karl Rove and
the national Republican Party. Connell died in a mysterious
plane crash in December, 2008, after being subpoenaed in
the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused on how
the 2004 election was decided (disclosure: we were attorney
and plaintiff in that suit).

Diebold's founder, Walden O'Dell, had vowed to deliver
Ohio's electoral votes---and thus the presidency---to his
friend George W. Bush. That it was done in part on
electronic voting machines and software O'Dell happened to
own (Diebold has since changed hands twice) remains a
cautionary red flag for those who believe merely winning the
popular vote will give Barack Obama a second term.

This
November, much of the Ohio electorate will cast its ballots
on machines again owned by close cronies of the Republican
presidential candidate. In Cincinnati and elsewhere around
the state, the e-voting apparati are owned by Hart
Intercivic. Hart's machines are infamous for mechanical
failures, "glitches," counting errors and other timely
problems now thoroughly identified with the way Republicans
steal elections. As in 2004, Ohio's governor is now a
Republican. This time it's the very right-wing John Kasich,
himself a multi-millionaire courtesy of a stint at Lehman
Brothers selling state bonds, and the largesse of Rupert
Murdoch, on whose Fox Network Kasich served as a late night
bloviator. Murdoch wrote Kasich a game-changing $1 million
check just prior to his winning the statehouse, an electoral
victory shrouded in electronic intrigue. The exit polls in
that election indicated that his opponent, incumbent
Democrat Ted Strickland, had actually won the popular vote.

Ohio's
very Republican Secretary of State is John Husted, currently
suing in the US Supreme Court to prevent the public from
voting on the weekend prior to election day. As did
Blackwell and Governor Robert Taft in 2004, Husted and
Kasich will control Ohio's electronic vote count on election
night free of meaningful public checks or balances

Hart
Intercivic, on whose machines the key votes will be cast in
Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, was taken over
last year by H.I.G. Capital. Prominent partners and
directors on the H.I.G. board hail from Bain Company or Bain
Capital, both connected to Mitt Romney. H.I.G. employees
have contributed at least $338,000 to Romney's campaign.
H.I.G. Directors John P. Bolduk and Douglas Berman are major
Romney fundraisers, as is former Bain and H.I.G. manager
Brian Shortsleeve.

US
courts have consistently ruled that the software in
electronic voting machines is proprietary to the
manufacturer, even though individual election boards may own
the actual machines. Thus there will be no vote count
transparency on election night in Ohio. The tally will be
conducted by Hart Intercivic and controlled by Husted and
Kasich, with no public recourse or accountability. As
federal testimony from the deceased Michael Connell made
clear in 2008, electronically flipping an election is
relatively cheap and easy to do, especially if you or your
compatriots programmed the machines.

So as
the corporate media swarm through Ohio, reporting
breathlessly from "ground zero" in Cincinnati, don't hold
your own breath waiting for them to also clarify that the
voting machines in what may once again be America's decisive
swing state are owned, programmed and tabulated by some of
the Romney campaign's closest associates.

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